It's Time We Listened To The Music And Not The Researchers

November 30, 1986|By Hawkeye Hurst

The dramatic success of Randy Travis' 600,000-sales-and-counting traditional-country album, Storms of Life, has hit Nashville's music industry like TNT.

Travis, on the national scene less than a year, recently won the Country Music Association's Horizon award. And, not only is he on the covers of entertainment journals, he's also featured in articles in such magazines as Newsweek.

So, most of the major record companies with offices in Nashville are scrambling to find themselves ''another Randy Travis.'' At least one company is rumored to be shifting its whole artistic approach toward Travis' musical direction.

But are record executives learning the lesson that Travis' popularity should be teaching?

Sure, they would reply. They've learned that there are lots of fans -- even young ones -- of traditional country music and that great traditional country music, especially when performed by a youngster, can have more marketplace impact than the bland contemporary-country sound everybody bowed down to for a decade hoping for crossover sales.

The above conclusions are doubtless true. But the lesson in all this is that ''market research,'' a primary arbiter of record and radio decisions today, isn't worth the reams of paper it's printed on.

Today's country music record company and radio executives, too often knowing next to nothing about the field in which they're supposed to be expert, can't seem to function without market research.

But in producing art, market research is worthless. First, for less than exorbitant costs, there's no way public opinion can be sampled in large enough quantities to be meaningful. Second, being able only to voice an opinion of what it has heard, the sampled public has no way of knowing how it likes something it doesn't know exists. In other words, market research could never have predicted the emergence of a Randy Travis.

Executives of WMAQ radio in Chicago, for example, justified broadcasting the records it played by pointing to a telephone survey system that purported to reach hundreds of people.

Even if it reached thousands, what kind of viable sample would that have been in a market of 3 million? And how could even the few people reached give any sort of worthwhile feedback on anything besides what they were hearing on the radio, if that?

Record company executives are just as guilty. Too few understand that they make their best decisions with their ears, not their reading glasses.

CBS Records, for instance, required only one listen to the new duo the O'Kanes before signing them and enthusiastically releasing their current single, ''Oh Darlin'.'' The same company, however, signed Gene Watson, another fine traditionalist in the Randy Travis vein, and then virtually sabotaged him in 1985 by taking the finest album of his career and -- by paying attention to market research -- releasing its weakest possible singles.

The prevailing wisdom for a decade or more has been that to sell well, country records must be ''positive'' and ''contemporary.''

Being ''positive'' means shunning the time-honored country subjects of sinning -- drinkin', cheatin', honky-tonkin' -- and remorse. Being ''contemporary'' means not only dealing with more upbeat subjects but also backing them with instrumentation sounding more showroom than honky-tonk.

Paying attention to such precepts has vastly widened the popularity of the musical category called ''country.'' The problem is, before the advent of the stardoms of such young traditionalists as Ricky Skaggs, Reba McEntire and George Strait, a point was being reached where there was no place in country music for country music anymore.

The successes of Skaggs, McEntire, Strait and now Travis shouldn't be taken to mean that there's now no place in country music for such things as pop-country, country-rock or folk-country.

If country music is to remain vital, it has to remain a meeting-ground for all kinds of musical ideas and sounds that relate in any way at all -- lyrically, instrumentally or simply by personality -- to ''country'' experiences or ideas.

But there has to be a strong center on which country music's departures can be anchored, and Storms of Life, one of the finest Nashville albums ever, symbolizes it.

In it, Travis sings about sorrow and all the negative aspects of life with which every listener has grappled, at least mentally. Because of Travis' artistry (and not just because most of them are ''negative,'' ''country'' songs), the listener glories in empathizing with such experiences. The process becomes almost ''positive,'' in the sense that these moments of travail have been experienced and survived.

But even Travis shouldn't feel safe in his new-found stardom. He must politely ignore the blandishments of brainstormers who even now are thinking how profitable it might be if he appealed to more symphonygoers or the wine- and-brie crowd or punks.

Trust me. Somewhere at this moment there are producers or record executives salivating over how much more popularity could be achieved if Travis did an album of tribute to Julio Iglesias or duets with Madonna or Sammy Davis Jr.

They don't know if the results would be better musically, but they're sure they would sell even better than Storms of Life. Their market research tells them so.